BASIC-PLUS was an extended dialect of the BASIC programming language developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for use on its RSTS/E time-sharing operating system for the PDP-11 series of 16-bit minicomputers in the early 1970s through the 1980s.

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  • BASIC-PLUS was an extended dialect of the BASIC programming language developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for use on its RSTS/E time-sharing operating system for the PDP-11 series of 16-bit minicomputers in the early 1970s through the 1980s. Users would sit at a terminal and type in programming language statements. The statements could either be entered into the system's command interpreter directly, or entered into a text editor, saved to a file, and loaded into the command interpreter from the file. Errors in source code were reported to the user immediately after the line was typed. The language system provided two modes of storage: * A program could be stored on the system in an editable source file (a .BAS file) using the "SAVE" command, or * Semi-compiled into a non-editable binary .BAC file by the "COMPILE" command. Source programs could be edited and run, similar to the BASIC interpreter which years later was included with the IBM PC in ROM. While the command interpreter had a "COMPILE" command, it was not a true native machine language compiler. The language was a semi-compiled language, in which a source program was "compiled" into byte code called "PPCODE" (Push-Pop Code), for a virtual stack machine, and the tokens interpretively executed, in a manner similar today to the execution of programs using the Java programming language. Programs were entered into the command interpreter starting with line numbers, integers from 1 to 32767, and were continued on multiple lines by using a line feed at the end of a line instead of the return (enter) key. For ease of external editing of the source file, later versions of BASIC-PLUS also allowed the & character as a line-continuation character. Multiple statements could be placed on a single line using \ or : as the statement separator. The virtual address space of a RSTS/E user was limited to a little less than 64KB of space. Using BASIC-PLUS, about half of this virtual address space was used by the combined command interpreter and run-time library (called the Run Time System on RSTS/E). This limited user programs to about 32KB of memory. Large programs were broken up into various pieces by use of the "CHAIN" statement, and programs could chain to specific line numbers in a secondary program to indicate that program should begin execution at a different point than its first line. This feature of chaining to a certain line number allowed programs to signal to each other that they were being called from another program. The use of a shared memory section called core common also allowed programs to pass data among each other as needed. Disk files could also be used but were slower. To conserve memory the interpreter included a garbage collecting memory manager, used for both string data and byte-code. A running program could be interrupted, have variables examined and modified, and then be resumed." (en)
  • BASIC-PLUS was an extended dialect of the BASIC programming language developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for use on its RSTS/E time-sharing operating system for the PDP-11 series of 16-bit minicomputers in the early 1970s through the 1980s. Users would sit at a terminal and type in programming language statements. The statements could either be entered into the system's command interpreter directly, or entered into a text editor, saved to a file, and loaded into the command interpreter from the file. Errors in source code were reported to the user immediately after the line was typed. The language system provided two modes of storage: * A program could be stored on the system in an editable source file (a .BAS file) using the "SAVE" command, or * Semi-compiled into a non-editable binary .BAC file by the "COMPILE" command. Source programs could be edited and run, similar to the BASIC interpreter which years later was included with the IBM PC in ROM. While the command interpreter had a "COMPILE" command, it was not a true native machine language compiler. The language was a semi-compiled language, in which a source program was "compiled" into byte code called "PPCODE" (Push-Pop Code), for a virtual stack machine, and the tokens interpretively executed, in a manner similar today to the execution of programs using the Java programming language. Programs were entered into the command interpreter starting with line numbers, integers from 1 to 32767, and were continued on multiple lines by using a line feed at the end of a line instead of the return (enter) key. For ease of external editing of the source file, later versions of BASIC-PLUS also allowed the & character as a line-continuation character. Multiple statements could be placed on a single line using \ or : as the statement separator. The virtual address space of a RSTS/E user was limited to a little less than 64KB of space. Using BASIC-PLUS, about half of this virtual address space was used by the combined command interpreter and run-time library (called the Run Time System on RSTS/E). This limited user programs to about 32KB of memory. Large programs were broken up into various pieces by use of the "CHAIN" statement, and programs could chain to specific line numbers in a secondary program to indicate that program should begin execution at a different point than its first line. This feature of chaining to a certain line number allowed programs to signal to each other that they were being called from another program. The use of a shared memory section called core common also allowed programs to pass data among each other as needed. Disk files could also be used but were slower. To conserve memory the interpreter included a garbage collecting memory manager, used for both string data and byte-code. A running program could be interrupted, have variables examined and modified, and then be resumed. (en)
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  • BASIC-PLUS was an extended dialect of the BASIC programming language developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for use on its RSTS/E time-sharing operating system for the PDP-11 series of 16-bit minicomputers in the early 1970s through the 1980s. (en)
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  • BASIC-PLUS (en)
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